pateras + fox

Anthony Pateras & Robin Fox Coagulate SYN007

THE WIRE (uk) - Philip Clark

Australian New Music has had a few genuinely maverick talents in the past - names like Keith Humble, Graham Hair and John Sangster - but the rise of the Synaesthesia label represents the most convincing and consistent strain of antipodean experimental thought. Anthony Pateras's previous Synaesthesia album Malfunction Studies (reviewed in The Wire 229) showed a young composer unafraid to twist and mash expectations of acoustic instruments through works for ensembles and instrumental duos. It blended alienated shards of percussion with the sound of vacuum cleaners in an unusually well judged and fresh hybrid.
Joining forces with Melbourne electronic sound artist Robin Fox, Pateras transfers this technically robust pioneer spirit to electronics. Apparently the sound sources here include feedback, discarded piano frames, ingested microphones and obsolete synthesizers. Throughout they let their material make its point and then move on before a good thing becomes too much. In "44 degree Splinter", Pateras and Fox work on the frame and wood of pianos, retaining a piano-like atmosphere but without a white or black key being sounded. The recording has extraordinary depth, and its stream of conciousness bites like a rabid prepared piano. "Cranking the Dwarf" turns feedback into a similarily intense study. The usual acrid tones are certainly present, but at a climatic point they're accelerated and transformed into a jokey cartoon voice. The disc reaches a lurid and forceful sonic peak with the penultimate "Circuits and Glass", before coming back to earth with delicated waves of sculpted feedback in "Recombinant:"